Funny Boy

A down-and-dirty comedy on HBO.

The six-part HBO comedy series “Eastbound & Down,” now just past its halfway point, appears, on the face of it, to be another prefab house of laughs of the kind that’s been extruded, over and over, in the past couple of years by the belching adolescent-humor factory of Apatow, Ferrell, Stiller & Rogen. Will Ferrell is the only one of those comedy machers who’s directly involved in “Eastbound & Down.” (He and his partner, Adam McKay—who co-wrote and directed a couple of Ferrell’s vehicles and started the Web site Funny or Die with him—are two of the show’s executive producers.) Still, the many interconnections among “Eastbound” ’s producers, writers, directors, and performers and the members of the funny firm would require a seminar to enumerate; they and a half-dozen or so others—including Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, and Jack Black—form an omnipresent happy band, a sort of Boobsbury group, who create and play characters that range across the spectrum from slacker to jackass, and the body odor emanating from “Eastbound & Down” will be recognizable to anyone who has seen such films as “Superbad,” “Drillbit Taylor,” “There’s Something About Mary,” and “Tropic Thunder.”

One of the newer inductees to the core group of funnymen is Danny McBride, the star of “Eastbound & Down”; in the show, he’s Kenny Powers, onetime Major League star reliever with a fastball of a hundred and one miles an hour, a speed that steadily decreased as his self-destructiveness—a combination of bad attitude, bad habits, and bad karma—accelerated. Kenny, profane and bombastic, sees his own story as epic: in a voice-over at the beginning of the first episode, he says, “When my ass was nineteen years old, I changed the face of professional baseball.” As a rookie, he helped his team win the World Series, but eventually his careless ways caught up with him. “Sometimes when you bring the thunder you get lost in the storm,” he explains. Even this early in the series, we sense that a good character has entered our midst. Kenny Powers, we’re delighted to discover, is totally full of it.

If you’ve seen any of the half-dozen movies that McBride has appeared in over the past few years, his playing this kind of role, and being so good in it, won’t surprise you. For one thing, he looks the part of a pitcher gone to seed, with a puffy body that comes complete with gut and double chin, and baggy eyes that suggest both not enough sleep and too much sleeping it off. But he was new to me, and at first I didn’t quite know why he held my attention; I just knew that there was something about Danny. His film roles have mostly been small—he is a movie-pyrotechnics specialist on location in “Tropic Thunder”; a slovenly bum with too much self-esteem in “Drillbit Taylor”; and has a cameo in “Superbad”—and all spring out of his starring role in a 2006 movie called “The Foot Fist Way,” in which he played a small-town Tae Kwon Do instructor. I think that part of what enables McBride to seem so at home in his own skin is the fact that he’s also a writer and has control of much of his material, and he isn’t working alone. He and his two collaborators, Jody Hill and Ben Best, were students together at North Carolina School of the Arts. They wrote “The Foot Fist Way” and “Eastbound & Down” (another college mate, Shawn Harwell, substituted for Best on three episodes); Best appears in both; and Hill appears in “The Foot Fist Way” and directed that movie and two episodes of “Eastbound.” The three amigos, now in their early thirties (though they could, and do, play characters who are older than that but have the maturity level of people who are younger than that), are also executive producers of both projects. In this company, McBride is comfortable improvising, and in “Eastbound” there’s a lot of pleasurable tension in watching Kenny create difficult situations with his poor judgment and get out of them with his escape artist’s quick brain.

After Kenny’s baseball career dies, he goes back to his North Carolina home town, moves in with his brother and his family, and gets a job as a substitute gym teacher at his old high school—not because he wants to but because the I.R.S. needs to garnish his wages and he doesn’t have any wages. On his first day at work, he runs into a former girlfriend, April (Katy Mixon), who is now a teacher at the school and clearly ambivalent about Kenny’s return. She’s engaged to the principal, a smiley, sexless straight arrow (Andrew Daly, a former “MADtv” cast member), who clearly isn’t right for her. It’s a classic romantic-comedy situation, with—standing in for Cary Grant—a pasty Tar Heel who sports a mullet, rides a Jet Ski with a topless companion, says that “the best part about being a celebrity is cashing in on it,” and vomits at a high-school dance. The band teacher, Stevie (Steve Little), also went to school with Kenny; he idolizes Kenny—needless to say, Kenny doesn’t remember him—and jumps at the chance to be his “assistant,” a job that basically means taking the blame for Kenny’s antics. Over time, the nerdish Stevie starts to resemble his idol, angry and reckless and even a little dangerous. It’s funny, and disturbing, to watch Stevie’s transformation, and to see that Kenny doesn’t care what the consequences are for Stevie. But that’s what’s good about McBride and about the character. There’s cruelty and meanness in “Eastbound & Down” (the title is an homage to Jerry Reed’s theme song for “Smokey and the Bandit”), and the show’s creators don’t pander to Kenny or use him just for laughs. The comedy is broad but not freewheeling.

“Eastbound” doesn’t make too many claims for itself. It has a grass-roots feeling to it, and would seem even more organic if Will Ferrell had absented himself; he’s in a couple of episodes, playing a local car dealer who is alternately impressed with Kenny and contemptuous of him. The performance, however useful it may be in calling attention to the series, calls an unwarranted amount of attention to itself. There are only six episodes of “Eastbound,” and supposedly the creators are open to the idea of continuing the story. It’s complete now, though, and should be left alone, just as Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant left “The Office” alone after a relatively small number of episodes. In both cases, the main character was a perfect depiction of a real jerk who wasn’t just a jerk. We all know such people; to some degree, we all are those people. Like David Brent, Kenny Powers will live on in our minds after he’s left the screen. ♦

Nancy Franklin joined The New Yorker in 1978 and was the magazine’s television critic from 1998 to 2011.